The invention relates to a filling apparatus working without any measuring devices as well as to a method for filling a container with fluid using the filling apparatus but without using any measuring devices.
There are known filling apparatuses and methods for filling containers in many embodiments. Where liquids, such as wine or chemicals, are concerned, it is often necessary to prevent the liquid from being exposed to ambient air and to avoid any undesired gas absorption, gas transfer or gas entry, which might result in a change in quality of the liquid.
There are known prior art methods in this regard, such as that disclosed in DE 10 2011 1005 60 B3 , which describes an apparatus that serves to apply the method and is intended to efficiently fill a container without any gas contact, the container containing a liquid intended for consumption. Therein, application of the method provides that at least one balloon-type expandable body is inserted into the container, said body being, arranged on a pipe and enclosing this pipe. After having been inserted into the container, this balloon-type body is expanded, thus entirely filling the interior region of the container and displacing ambient air out of the container. Thereafter, liquid is caused to flow into the container while, at the same time, the expansion medium is displaced through the pipe and out of the balloon-type body. After the container has been filled completely, the balloon-type body is removed from the container and provided for the next filling operation.
In order to be able to always fill the same filling volume into the containers, methods such as the aforementioned one provide that, to fill the container with a desired filling volume or nominal volume, the liquid is predosed in a sensor-controlled manner using a control unit which usually is a magnetic-inductive flow meter or is filled into the respective container using a piston system.
For production-related reasons, containers such as bottles can be provided for receiving identical quantities but may, therein, have bottoms or walls with varying thickness, so that the actual filling capacity varies to a minor degree; in case of glass bottles having the usual filling capacities, such as for wine, etc., this variation may reach up to 10 ml, so that the volume that is always correctly dosed by means of a magnetic-inductive flow meter results in different filling levels which will be visually noticeable especially in the vicinity of the neck of the bottle—thus affecting, for example, the consumers' behaviour.
Based on this prior art, it is an object of the invention to create a method for filling containers which allows reaching a constant filling level even with different container shapes.